The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  The Republican Party was gradually shedding moderates. In addition to Hugh Scott’s departure, two of the unsung Senate giants, George Aiken of Vermont and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, had retired at the end of the two previous Congresses. Aiken, rock-ribbed and independent, had breakfasted with Mike Mansfield every morning. Americans of all ages could recite Senator Aiken’s four-word plan for ending the Vietnam War: “declare victory and leave.” Cooper had played a major role in formulating and carrying out the bipartisan foreign policy of the years following World War II. He had been appointed by President Truman to be a delegate to the United Nations, served as special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, been deeply involved in the reconstruction of Germany and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and served as ambassador to India and Nepal. Cooper’s knowledge of the world and his reputation for absolute fairness made him influential with many of his colleagues; he had joined Democrat Frank Church in the successful, bipartisan effort to cut off funding to military operations in Cambodia in 1971. These were not senators easily replaced, and their departures changed the Republican caucus.

  But beyond that, the Senate Republicans were in a testy mood. Many had defended Nixon, thinking that the Democrats were trying to make something out of what Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, had dismissed as a “third rate burglary.” They now knew that Nixon had lied to them, and worse, he had thrown away his 1972 landslide victory that could have cemented the Republican majority for a decade or more.

  By 1977, a new group of Republican senators was coming to prominence. These men combined strident right-wing views with an intolerance of compromise. An increasing number of the Senate Republicans had come to oppose Nixon’s policy of détente toward the Soviet Union that he and Henry Kissinger had carried out. Those Republican senators reflected the right wing of the party, had never embraced Gerald Ford’s presidency, and were angry that Kissinger was still on the scene. This wing of the GOP had supported Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford’s renomination, a hard run and bitter contest. Hammering away at détente and the Panama Canal treaty, Reagan had almost seized the nomination from Ford. The Republican right had forced Ford to jettison Nelson Rockefeller, his chosen vice president, whose liberal views were anathema to them. The intensity of the Republican right had been one important factor in Ford’s choice of Dole over Baker. Compromise was the lifeblood of politics, and particularly necessary in the Senate, where so much business was conducted by unanimous consent. Howard Baker would lead the Republicans at a time when, for some members of his caucus, compromise was beginning to be a dirty word.

  SENATE LEADERS WORKED TOGETHER, so Baker’s largest challenge would be one that Byrd would share: the personification of hard-right intolerance, Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Helms had won election to the Senate in 1972 as the first Republican senator elected in North Carolina since Reconstruction. His election was a byproduct of Richard Nixon’s landslide over George McGovern, representing a triumph for Nixon’s southern strategy, by which the Republicans would seize the south, and therefore, the nation, by deliberately polarizing the country over a range of issues that centered on race.

  Helms had followed a unique path to the Senate. He returned from World War II where he had worked as a military recruiter, to a career in journalism, first in newspapers, then in radio. He served for a brief time on the city council in Charlotte, North Carolina, and eighteen months as administrative assistant to Senator Willis Smith, a North Carolina Democrat. After Senator Smith died unexpectedly in 1953, Helms, then thirty, returned to North Carolina to become the principal lobbyist for the North Carolina Bankers’ Association (NCBA).

  While he worked with the NCBA, WRAL, a television station in Raleigh, invited Helms to broadcast a weekly news commentary, Facts of the Matter. Starting in 1957, Helms’s weekly program allowed him to take on the “liberal establishment.” Helms’s main themes included opposition to the growth of federal power, skepticism about an internationalist foreign policy, and, above all, support for separation of the races.

  In 1960, Helms became the full-time executive vice president of WRAL, with responsibility for operations and programming. A. J. Fletcher, the right-wing owner of WRAL, wanted to make the station a beacon for conservatives and break the liberal monopoly that he believed was controlling North Carolina media. Fletcher asked Helms to expand Facts of the Matter to a new series of daily television editorials, known as Viewpoints, which would be broadcast twice a day, five days a week. Helms received carte blanche to choose his themes, and between November 1960 and February 1972, Jesse Helms broadcast 2,732 viewpoints.

  Helms’s very first viewpoint, on November 21, 1960, was an attack on president-elect Kennedy, and throughout his viewpoints, Helms assaulted liberalism. He stressed the dangers posed by an ever-growing government and the threat of socialism to freedom. The “sacred cows” of “subsidies, controls and federal aid” all consumed freedom. He expressed strong anti-communism, weaving his hatred of the Soviet Union into his oft-repeated refrain that liberals were diminishing freedom for Americans. He became one of the most prominent voices attacking liberalism, and radicalism, in universities, using the free speech movement at Berkeley to support his attack on the liberal administration of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

  Strongest of his viewpoints was his vehement opposition to the civil rights movement, which was gaining strength in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South. His broadcasts gave him hundreds of opportunities to attack and attempt to discredit the civil rights movement, and on the air, during those years, Helms formulated many of the themes that would later resonate from Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians, including attacks on “forced integration,” “welfare handouts,” and “radical agitators,” who were disrupting what Helms portrayed as the otherwise fine relations between whites and blacks in North Carolina. Helms denied the existence of discrimination against black Americans; in his view, the real problem was the failure of black Americans to take responsibility for the breakdown of the structure of black families and communities.

  Helms worked hard to link “liberalism, subversion and perversion,” attacking Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for sexual immorality and Bayard Rustin, a distinguished civil rights leader, for being a known homosexual and an avowed Communist. Helms sought to rally his audience around a radical new conservatism that rejected interventionist government, resisted integration, ridiculed student protestors and campus activism, and opposed societal changes in morality and sexuality.

  By the late 1960’s, Helms had become the leading voice of the conservatives in North Carolina. He had always been politically ambitious, and when he glimpsed an opportunity to run for the Senate, he jumped at it, even though the Democratic incumbent senator, B. Everett Jordan, was an old friend of his. In the 1972 Democratic primary Senator Jordan was upset by the liberal Congressman Nick Galifianakis, setting up a classic confrontation between the ideological opposites that made up the two increasingly disparate strands of North Carolina politics.

  Running statewide for the first time, Helms was not a particularly effective campaigner, but he was well financed, already well known, and running on Richard Nixon’s ticket. His opponent found himself on a ticket headed by George McGovern, who would be routed nationally and in North Carolina. On election night, Jesse Helms’s victory may have taken Washington by surprise, but the people of North Carolina knew what they were getting. By a narrow margin, the majority of the voters in the Tar Heel State wanted what Jesse Helms was offering, and in the coming decades, they would return him to office, time and again.

  When Helms arrived in the Senate in January 1973, he encountered a discouraging environment. Despite Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern, the Democrats remained in firm control of both houses of Congress. The Republicans had been in the minority in the Senate since 1955, and for the most part, had grown both accustomed and comfortable with it. As Helms confided to a friend shortly
after arriving, the Senate GOP was “almost as lib’rul” as the other side.” He was right; the Republican ranks contained many senators who were moderate to liberal. They took pride in their role in the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Great Society legislation, and in their growing opposition to the Vietnam War. In short, many of the Senate Republicans, and the overwhelming majority of the Senate, stood for everything that Jesse Helms came to Washington to stop. But in some ways, this was Helms’s ideal moment. Nixon had won by a landslide; his southern strategy was working; the “liberal hour” of the 1960’s was approaching its end—and Helms would do everything he could to hasten its conclusion.

  The Senate had changed a great deal in the two decades since Helms had briefly worked there—but some things hadn’t changed. Helms understood that the Senate, a pillar of the Republic, was also a delicate institution that relied on comity because it operated by unanimous consent and offered the opportunity for unlimited debate. Consequently, the Senate could be diverted, derailed, and even driven by a handful of senators—and often just one—who had an agenda and was willing to incur the wrath of the other senators.

  When Helms arrived in the Senate in January 1973, Jim Allen, the Alabama Democrat who was a master of parliamentary obstruction, made it a point to be the first senator to greet him. Soon, Helms was seeking out Allen as a mentor, and they met twice a week in Allen’s office on the 6th floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Jesse Helms planned to be an insurgent, and for an insurgent, knowing the Senate’s byzantine rules was important for driving an agenda to frustrate the majority.

  Within weeks of arriving in the Senate, Helms had made himself a force to be reckoned with. He quickly began making the Senate consider one controversial amendment after another—“throwing legislative smoke bombs, amid dozing senators in the near empty chamber.” In his first two months, Helms had sponsored or cosponsored seventeen bills and four resolutions. His two most prominent proposals were constitutional amendments to permit school prayer and end school busing.

  He virtually never won, but winning was not the point. He wanted to force senators to make controversial votes, making them vulnerable to attack at home, and he wanted to disrupt the Senate’s bipartisan comity. He was also seeking to build a national “conservative” constituency. “Defeats don’t discourage me,” Helms told an interviewer in 1976. It was “good to get people on the record,” to make his fellow senators “feel the heat so they would see the light.”

  Just as Jim Allen had invented the post-cloture filibuster, Jesse Helms had invented a powerful new political weapon. The votes that senators cast, of course, had always been fair game for their opponents in political campaigns. But those votes arose in the course of normal Senate business. Using the Senate to raise issues for the purpose of making Democrats cast painful votes that could be used against them in campaigns—this broke new ground.

  Helms also began regularly to resort to the filibuster. He filibustered a compromise between the Nixon administration and Congress on legislation to establish the Legal Services Corporation, saying that it would “contribute to social disruption and serve to encourage would-be rioters.” He filibustered a Senate campaign finance bill that eventually passed by a vote of 88–1. He filibustered a bill that would have strengthened the government’s antitrust powers, and after a cloture vote presumably ended the filibuster, he conducted a post-cloture filibuster, offering amendment after amendment until the managers of the bill made concessions to him, changing its character in order to secure Senate passage. To Helms, the filibuster was “the only way a minority has to work its will.” Whether, in a democracy, the minority should be able to work its will, was a problem for others to consider—namely, the majority whose will was being thwarted.

  January 1973 also proved to be a historic moment for Helms to arrive in the Senate. On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, holding by a 7–2 vote that the Constitution established and protected a right to privacy that enabled a woman to choose an abortion in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Years earlier, Helms had already begun to add the “social issues,” such as school prayer, to the more traditional issues of opposition to civil rights and communism that were standard fare on the right-wing agenda. But no social issue would be more central to Helms’s agenda, and to the rise of the right wing as a national movement, than opposing the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and championing the rights of the unborn.

  Helms’s “take no prisoners” style was not just directed at Democrats. He had been friends with Richard Nixon since 1951 when he worked in an office down the hall from Senator Nixon’s. Although he still admired Nixon’s early anti-communism and recently benefited from Nixon’s southern strategy, Helms believed that Nixon had become much too liberal on domestic issues and far too willing to spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Moreover, Helms despised Nixon’s approach to foreign policy, judging his policy of détente toward the Soviet Union as weak and immoral. Helms was appalled when Gerald Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president and decided to keep Henry Kissinger, the architect of détente, as his secretary of state. When Ford, acting on the advice of Kissinger, refused to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Russian author and Nobel Prize winner, Helms had had enough. He gave serious thought to leaving the Republican Party to form a new right-wing party. But when Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican presidential nomination, Helms saw a better path for changing the Republican Party, and the country. He became one of Reagan’s most ardent and effective supporters.

  Helms would continue using the Senate to hold the feet of the “lib’ruls” to the fire, forcing painful votes at every turn. He would work tirelessly with a collection of loosely connected outside groups to build the “New Right” across the nation, in the hope of making Reagan president in 1980.

  DESPITE THE CHALLENGES HE would face, Baker had understandable confidence in his ability to navigate difficult currents. He had seen his father-in-law support Kennedy and Johnson on issues of overriding importance, while keeping his Republican bona fides by uniting his party and confronting the presidents on lesser issues. Baker had an exceptional ability to bridge seemingly irreconcilable views through a disarming and conciliatory brand of bargaining. Lisa Myers would write: “To hear [senators] talk, Howard Henry Baker could bring together a boll weevil and a cotton planter.” His stepmother, a distinguished politician in her own right, once said, “Howard is like the Tennessee River. He always runs right down the middle.” If there was a middle to be found, Baker would find it.

  Baker quickly moved to share the leadership responsibilities with a large group of ideologically diverse Republicans. Ted Stevens of Alaska, a thoughtful moderate, would be Republican whip. Stevens would keep a foot in each camp of the Senate Republicans, breakfasting with both the liberal Wednesday Group and the conservative Steering Committee. John Tower of Texas, a hard-liner on defense issues and conservative on economic policy, would remain as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, with enhanced resources. Conservatives Carl Curtis of Nebraska and Jake Garn of Utah would chair the Republican Conference and the Committee on Committees. Bob Packwood, perhaps the strongest defender of abortion rights in the Senate, would chair the Republican Campaign Committee. Jacob Javits of New York, generally regarded as the most liberal Republican and the smartest senator, would head an economic policy task force; Clifford Hansen of Wyoming would head the energy policy task force. Baker planned for the Republicans to emerge as a counterforce in the Senate, and he wanted them to have coherent alternatives to offer in contrast to the new Carter administration.

  Baker faced one other problem that Dirksen had not when he became leader. Howard Baker hoped to be president someday. So, in addition to the multiple pressures that pull on a Senate leader, Baker would always have to be weighing whether his actions furthered or undermined his presidential ambitions.

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p; The incoming Senate would have sixty-one Democrats, thirty-eight Republicans, and one independent, Harry Byrd of Virginia—virtually the same balance as the previous one. This was surprising, given the supposedly strong national tide favoring the Democrats after Watergate. But the status quo result was deceptive, because the incoming Senate would include seventeen new members, the largest turnover since the historic 1958 election. Mostly, it was a generation shift; more than half of the changes resulted from the retirement or defeat of veterans who had served three or four terms. But to the extent a political message could be discerned, it was that the West was becoming more conservative, as Republicans defeated Democrats in Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California.

  The new senators promised to be a diverse and interesting group. Paul Sarbanes, Democrat from Maryland, was a Rhodes Scholar well known on Capitol Hill for his impressive work on the House Judiciary Committee, which voted out the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Don Riegle, Democrat of Michigan, was a young (thirty-eight), charismatic, driven politician who had already switched parties after being elected to the House as a Republican and written an exposé of Congress. John Danforth, Republican of Missouri, was his state’s attorney general, an ordained minister, and the scion of the family that controlled Ralston-Purina. S. I. Hayakawa, Republican of California, was a professor of linguistics who had risen to prominence as president of San Francisco State, taking a hard line against campus demonstrators.

  The most famous member of the entering senators was undoubtedly Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, former U.N. ambassador; adviser to four presidents, Democratic and Republican; Harvard professor and author, provocateur, and disturber of the intellectual peace. Moynihan’s work in the Nixon White House, including his frank assessment that the Negro family in America was disintegrating, had earned him the enmity of many liberals. His assertive stance at the UN in support of Israel and in opposition to America’s enemies had won him a huge following in New York and around the country. Moynihan knew the Senate well, having crafted Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan that had been killed in the Senate by Russell Long, the chairman of the Finance Committee. The Senate prided itself on being a place for large men, and Moynihan, wearing his trademark bow tie, stammering with a distinctive British accent, and constantly writing his next book, certainly promised to fit that bill.